


all great and precious things (are lonely)

by impertinences



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, Jealousy, Love/Hate, Nonlinear Narrative, Pirates, Power Dynamics, Shameless Smut, pirate-appropriate language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 20:15:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10906689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: Eleanor holds herself accountable, now and later. She will reap what she has sown. It’s her fault. She’s invented him, after all, this version of Vane that is a contradiction: that is ruthless and violent and stalwart and weak and worshipful.She’s invented him, and because he’s hers, she feels entitled to his destruction: to offer him as a sacrifice to her own ambitions.[Pre-series through season 2 timeline]





	all great and precious things (are lonely)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from _East of Eden_

 

“Vengeance built my hastily,

and I drag the clinging notion I was nobody.”

\- “Vengeance is Sleeping”

 

"Not all love is gentle.

…Sometimes it feels like teeth."

\- Azra T.

 

 

After he's licked the sweat from her collarbone and she's untangled her hands from his hair, once they've caught their breath and she's stroking the rough patch of stubble along his jaw in an idle, contented manner, Charles asks about the Ranger's recent haul. 

There's an almost imperceptible tightening in Eleanor's shoulders as she begins to unwind herself from him. She takes her hand away from his face as though the mention of business has broken her reverie, forced her to return to her carefully crafted persona – the clever shrew he sees so often below in the tavern or reigning at the warehouse – and leave the woman behind as a shadow of salt across his chest. He can see the seriousness return to her gaze. The flush of color on her cheeks and her breasts is fading.

"Sixty percent for you and your men is more than fair considering the state of those goods, Charles. You know the rules." She says it with a smile, but it’s still a rebuke. She wishes he hadn’t broached the subject at all; she says as much by leaving the warmth of her bed. Left alone, Charles looks even larger and more imposing. Now, her red sheets strewn so carelessly across his narrow waist connote violence rather than passion. 

"Eleanor," Charles tries, keeping his rough voice soft. It's a weakness, he knows, this particular way he handles her.

She half-turns from him, showing the smooth expanse of her back, another silent reproach but also, maybe, a peace offering. It’s his choice – he can watch her and be silent – because she _is_ lovely in the glow from the fire-light and lanterns, the warmth highlighting the golden tone of her skin, making her hair as pale and bright as seafoam, softening the blunt angles of her face. She’s dressing slowly, letting him watch, pulling her shirt on first and working the buttons up rather than down, making a subtle tease of the way she hides the curves of her breasts.

“Eleanor,” he says again, incessant.

He’s made his choice, so she dresses with more efficiency, slipping into her skirts and tucking her shirt into the cinching high-waist fabric. She fastens her belt and secures her keys, pulls on her boots. It isn't until she's properly clothed and he says her name for a third time that she addresses him by glance, the kind mothers use to pacify children. She's already lifting her hand, beseeching him with the outstretched plea of her fingers and show of her palm in the universal signal for silence.

It’s dismissive, the gesture. She's waving him away; she doesn't want to talk about it, she can't be bothered, her say is law, he should be grateful for what he has. It's the condescending, expectant, entitled mannerisms she uses and all their layered meanings that undo him. His anger flashes, bright and boiling, twisting his gut like rot. 

"You gave more to Flint just last month on a prize half the Ranger's size."

Eleanor arches an eyebrow and lets the steel undercurrent she uses for meetings creep back into her voice. "Are we back on this now? Suggesting favoritism? Tame those animals you claim to captain, and maybe your goods won't be blood-soaked and half-spoiled by the time you make it to port. You make what you earn, just like everyone else."

"And you?" 

"What about me?" She sighs, annoyed, twisting her hair up from her neck quickly and securing it with a jade clip. 

"Are you what I've earned? Have you been compensating me?" He says it with a smirk, watching the questions land as insults to her pride, memorizing the way the planes of her face shift from simple frustration to indignant anger. What had she told him six months ago, half-drunk from rum, so brazenly unafraid when he had cornered her against the edge of the bar, pressed his thigh between her legs and taken a fistful of her hair? _Only this once._

Eleanor squares her shoulders and faces him fully, the firelight shrinking from her now that she is dressed and less vulnerable. Charles is still sprawled across her bed like he owns it, unabashed in his nakedness, a man comfortable displaying his skin and scars. She meets his arrogant gaze with her own and is struck by the ugliness he possesses; it's a characteristic of his that she has always seen but sometimes ignored. He is a man of greed, hungry for power, half-beast himself. He is out of place, too calloused and too predatory for her quarters. He's staining this small, private space she has built for herself, and she’s allowed him to. 

Eleanor is struck by a simple truth: each moment when she forgets herself and allows him into her bed, for every time she takes him inside of her, she is made all the lesser for it. With him by her side, a never-satiated void of hunger, she will be utterly consumed. He will be the shadow to blot out her sun.

"You're just a man," she says, gaining strength with each carefully pronounced word, one hand perching on her hip so that her stance is more matriarch than damsel. "And I have a hundred men with a hundred other ships on this fucking island."

If she hates the way he outshines her, then Vane hates this about her - the simple but blistering way she has of addressing those she feels are beneath her. She, daughter of a man made rich from the black market, commerce-controller by name and will alone. But what is she really? Eleanor Guthrie: the bane and life of Nassau. A surrogate for the son and heir her father had wanted but never received. A girl playing amongst men. A string-puller whose hands are still soft, whose power is more from conspiring than acting. As desperate to prove herself as he is.

He has never met a woman with her resolve. Even with her thighs still sticky from where he'd held her open and fucked her until she was shaking beneath him, her nails like claws on his back, she can stand here with him after and muster all the wrath and power of a hurricane. Her unflinching gaze and straight spine insults him. She has no shame, her body says, only judgement of him.

She had valued his worth and found him wanting. A man among men, the queen had decreed. Neither legend nor folklore. 

He wants to tell her that she's underestimating him - something he's never done of her. He wants to tell her that she has no idea who he is or what he's capable of, that he is feared both here and abroad, and that a smarter woman would recognize his greatness. But she’s already turning away from him and throwing up the doors of her office. The din from below of drunken pirates and working girls, of rum being poured, and the more distant sound of crashing waves permeates the room, drowning the last remnants of privacy between them.  

"Get dressed,” she orders, a hand on the weathered, chipped doorframe, her face half-turned so that she can only see the outline of him from her periphery. “And don't make the mistake of thinking you'll ever be in here again.”

Later, when Charles tells his crew that the Guthrie woman will not renege on the Ranger's worth, they curse and howl like feral dogs. 

"Cunt," Anne says from behind the rim of her mug, her whole mouth arching into the word. 

 

 

 

 

When Vane next sees Eleanor, she's at the brothel with a pretty creole whore sitting close, and she's _laughing_. As Eleanor reaches for the pitcher of rum, the whore touches the inside of Eleanor's wrist - light and kind, a touch as soft as feather-down. 

She lifts her eyes.

Her gaze passes over Vane, unquestioning, unnoticing, in blatant denial of him and their history. 

 

 

_How did you feel when she threw you aside?_

 

 

 

 

 It’s the first time, and it starts suddenly - the tavern having only recently emptied for the night – with Charles stalking forwarding. (She’ll remember that in the morning – the predatory way he had approached her, how swiftly he had seemed to appear from the darkness, and how the rest was a collision.) Her hands are still sticky from cleaning spills, and there’s sweat on her neck. His eyes are bright but they darken when he catches her by the arms. Eleanor stares at him, weighing the moment, prolonging the tense gap of silence.

She swallows, and his eyes follow the dip of her throat. When she speaks, her voice is softer than she wants it to be.

"Only this once," Eleanor says, managing a tone of authority that Charles dismantles with a grin.

He can taste island fruit and salt on her mouth when he kisses her, one hand catching at the back of her head, tangling into her hair. He is tall and lean and Eleanor grips his arms when he lifts her, a reverse of his initial touch, and one hand clutches the leather straps around his neck, the metal pendants and assortment of beads pinching against her skin. Too rushed and hungry to bother with retreating to her tiny alcove of a bed, he hoists her up against the bar and pushes up her skirts, pushes the small of her back against the counter's edge, knocking her thighs apart with his knee until her legs wrap around his waist, and then he pushes into her too. 

She isn't ready for him. He tears and she bites down on a cry, too stubborn to protest. 

His mouth, wet at the underside of her jaw, her hands in his hair now, Charles braces himself by throwing an arm around her waist, leaning into the leverage the bar provides as they rock into one another. There’s so much anger in him – half of it is directed at her as he batters against her bones – but the rest is aimless, a powerful, directionless void that threatens to swallow them both. He curls his arm further around her waist, half pulling her and pinning her at once, his other calloused, dirty hand fumbling up beneath her skirts as they rut against each other. He gets his palm beneath one of her legs and her muscles protest in a way that’s satisfying when her leg is lifted, her knee bent at his shoulder. The bar is digging into her spine, bruising her, and a strangled, keening, desperate noise is pulled unwillingly from her mouth. She’s seen whores fucked liked this, seen the many ways a man can take from a woman’s body, but she’s never really felt it before. She tips her head back, yielding, her hair sticking at her mouth, her nails in the back of his neck, his shoulders, a fist of her fingers in his hair until they’re tangled in one another.

“Eleanor,” he says, his body still pushing too hard against hers, but he says her name like a secret. He says it gently, so it’s reverent and terrible. Dipping his head, his mouth is on hers again. It should be messy, a clash and smear of lips, heat, and breath, but despite the fervent way his hips slice forward and the eager hold she has on him, his mouth is soft. Eleanor feels something inside of her loosen and crash when he cradles her face between his palms, their foreheads touching. His face is too close, he’s watching her, his fingers digging into her jaw. She’s enveloped by him.

He wants this to mean something, she realizes, with a pang of dread and lust.

But maybe she does too because she echoes his name, a huff of breath against his mouth.

 

 

 

 

_You will turn on absolutely anyone, won’t you?_

 

 

 

He tells her the slaughter of Ned Low and his crew isn't for her, but Eleanor rewards him anyway (the ruse is thin – his intentions are obvious). She starts by dropping to her knees to unfasten his pants. When he pushes her against a table, she turns around, his hands already hiking up her skirts, her legs bending and knees pressing painfully against the bench. Eleanor knows: Charles would prefer to have a queen on her knees, and it’s always been easy to surrender to him, her body remembers, there really aren’t any façades left for her to shred.

She can feel the heat of his body between the layers of their clothing. He stretches over her, his chest to her back, and his hand is in her hair again, his grip tight. She moans when she rolls her hips back to meet him, and his hand slips to the side of her jaw, clamps over her mouth. He tastes like sea salt and sand, his palm rough against her lips. She turns her face and takes two of his fingers into her mouth.

When it’s over, Charles tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear, traces his thumb across the top of her jaw, rubs it across the corner of her mouth gently. He isn’t smiling, but there’s the hint of a half-grin on his face before he nods towards the bed. She follows his lead; she stays the night.

In bed, he throws an arm over her waist but falls asleep with his head turned away from her, and she lies on her back, staring at the fort’s weathered ceiling. They don’t speak, but in the morning she’ll wake to the sight of Flint’s ship in the harbor and feel the stirrings of doubt and regret twist her stomach into knots.

Eleanor holds herself accountable, now and later. She will reap what she has sown. It’s her fault. She’s invented him, after all, this version of Vane that is a contradiction: that is ruthless and violent and stalwart and weak and worshipful. She’s invented him, and because he’s hers, she feels entitled to his destruction: to offer him as a sacrifice to her own ambitions.

She’s responsible.

She tells herself this, a silent mantra she repeats in her mind, after she’s stolen Lord Ashe’s daughter, when she turns the key in the lock and forces herself to meet his eyes.

She’s responsible.

 

 

 

_I think that’s why you’re so frustrated with me because you know all this, because you know I know this, and because you know you are so much more like me than anyone you’ve ever met in your entire life._

 

 

 

Like most of his kind, Charles was raised on myths. Stories of sea dragons and many-tentacled beasts, ocean funnels of sharp teeth and endless appetites, ghoulish captains whose sole purposes are ferrying the souls of the dead. But it was mermaids that fascinated him the most as a boy, those beautiful sirens whose voices lured men to their watery graves. Women whose power was directly linked to their sexuality, to their ravenous hunger, to the desire for pure conquest. 

As his life progressed, he was not shown fantasy but raw, brutal truth. His mother had not been a siren. Charles thinks of her fleetingly. She is a paper thin imitation of a woman - easily bruised, thin-blooded, hissing in the way of street cats. He cannot even remember her name. Silent Anne is a wraith, Jack's shadow, as ruthless as any of the men on his crew, but she is too jagged and salted by the sea to be mythical. So he is a man more than half grown, skin darkened from the sun and weathered by the sea winds, a Captain of infamy and anger, a man too wild to chain, when he finally understands what Homer was trying to convey with Odysseus’s prophetic sirens.

The first time he sees Eleanor descend the stairs of the brothel, her hand trailing over the ivy-tangled banister, he’s caught by the graceful curvature of her walk and the self-possessed way she carries her body. Hers is the ivory neck of myths. Her hair loose and golden, strands catching the square line of her jaw. Her eyes as bright as Caribbean waters. When she turns her head, shooting Charles a brief look, he understands the desire to plunder, to want, to hunger.

He doesn’t realize then. She’s more storm than folklore.  

He will learn.

 

 


End file.
